Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2012
Summary
This is the story of how a climate event, the so-called “Little Ice Age,” nearly brought down the Ottoman Empire around 1600 AD. And although that would be a story worth telling on its own, this study offers to explain much more. Through the narrative of climate and crisis, the following pages will explore the rise of an empire and its provisioning, settlement, and population. We will see how a complex set of circumstances conspired to create a climate-led catastrophe; and how the crisis of the Little Ice Age marked a critical conjuncture in the human ecology of Ottoman lands, as centuries of growth and expansion turned for a time to contraction and retreat. The story that follows describes much more than a single episode in the life of an empire. It represents nothing less than a turning point in the history of the Near East and by extension the making of the modern world.
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